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Sacramento Business Journal spotlights Kitchell CEM’s President Russ Fox

Sacramento Business Journal reporter Ben Van der Meer sat down this spring with Kitchell CEM President Russ Fox for one of the publication’s executive profiles. Below is the original article.

Russ Fox head shot

As president of one of Sacramento’s leading public-sector construction companies, Russ Fox said he’s got a special place in his heart for construction projects at community colleges.

His own experience attending community college is the reason why. After graduating high school in Willows, Fox took classes at Shasta College in Redding. “I didn’t have a clue what I was going to do when I grew up,” he said. “Community colleges helped me out.”

During school breaks, he worked on a house remodeling project. A superintendent told him that if he got a degree in construction management, he could do anything in the field.

Fox finished his undergraduate requirements at Shasta and transferred to the highly regarded construction management program at California State University Chico. That paved the way for everything that’s happened in his career since.

Fox’s first job after college was in Stockton, building offshore oil platforms that eventually would go off the coast of Southern California. Fox said the work wasn’t glorious but, after growing up poor, he was happy to have it.

A year in, however, the company wanted to transfer him to El Centro in Southern California. He was not enamored with the idea of moving to the desert. Instead, in 1986 Fox got a job with Kitchell based on the recommendation of a former colleague who’d joined the company.

Fox’s first job with Kitchell was working on state correctional prison projects when California was in the midst of a prison building boom in the 1980s. He steadily moved up the ranks, first managing projects in the field, then operations, then becoming the vice president for Kitchell CEM’s western region. Kitchell CEM is one of five separate but related companies with the Kitchell name and is based in Sacramento.

In 2008, Fox became Kitchell CEM president. During his entire time at Kitchell, he only had one, fleeting desire to look into a position with another company, he said.

“It’s an employee-owned company, and I’ve never been asked to do something that was against my core values,” he said. “And when I make a business decision, I worry about how it affects the retirement of everyone down to the receptionist.”

Phoenix Business Journal shines light on Kitchell’s new prefabrication shop

Senior Reporter Mike Sunnucks took a look at our newest enterprise, a prefabrication shop in Tempe, Ariz. that is already changing the way our clients approach construction. Why? Cost savings, time efficiencies and enhanced safety.

 

Here’s the article…

The List: Kitchell looks to change construction game via prefabrication

Kitchell Corp. — one of the region’s largest construction contractors — is expanding its use of prefabrication to build components for construction projects.

Kitchell’s Scott Root and Brent Moszeter hope the prefabrication idea revolutionizes the construction business. “We want to build projects like Lego blocks,” Moszeter said.

Kitchell has a 33,000-square-foot center in Tempe where workers are deployed to build components such as bathrooms, walls, drywall sheets, window frames and electrical systems.
The prefabricated components then are trucked to construction sites. “We set the shop up as an assembly line,” said Moszeter, a senior project superintendent for Phoenix-based Kitchell.“We can do three jobs at once.” Moszeter said the prefab center is different than other centralized operations set up by builders because components are built to project and customer specifications. Others prefabs tend to be cookie- cutter productions centers.

The Kitchell center is located near Kyrene and Elliot roads in Tempe. Kitchell used the prefab center to make bathrooms for a $125 million project at the Chandler Regional Medical Center. Prefabrication saved $4 million on that project. The Tempe center is being used for Kitchell’s project on the emergency room at Phoenix Children’s Hospital. Like other assembly lines and production facilities, Moszeter and Root said workers can stay focused on what they are building, projects can get going before government approvals and less employees are
needed for jobs.

“You can shave weeks or months off a project schedule,” Root said. Moszeter said a centralized work flow can mean fewer workers are needed per project, and Kitchell can keep hard-to-find tradesmen such as framers busy.

Kitchell also has 10,000 square feet of offices at the center, which is used for design, project management, 3-D printing and a virtual reality studio to work with subcontractors and customers on projects.

The prefab center is swamp-cooled but still can have workers out of Phoenix’s desert heat. Prefabrication has been more common in Europe and Asia than the U.S., but the concept is growing. It’s also becoming more prevalent in construction for certain sectors. Prefab and modularization at work is being done on 49 percent of hospital and health care and 42 percent of education and manufacturing construction projects in the U.S., according to a study McGraw-Hill Construction.